


unfiltered

by novembersmith



Category: Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk - Ben Fountain
Genre: Age Difference, Canon-typical discussions of violence, Chain of Command Violations, Grief/Mourning, M/M, Post-Canon, Smoking, Uneven Power Dynamics, Yuleporn
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-18
Updated: 2016-12-18
Packaged: 2018-09-09 13:34:50
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,043
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8892682
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/novembersmith/pseuds/novembersmith
Summary: “You okay, Sergeant?” Billy says into the hush, the in and out of nicotine and tar.“No, Billy, I am not,” Dime says, closing his eyes and then finally turns, eyes still closed, and blows a perfect smoke ring into Billy’s face.





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [storiesfortravellers](https://archiveofourown.org/users/storiesfortravellers/gifts).



> Storiesfortravellers, I've seen your prompts for this fandom for a few yuletides now, and am so excited I finally got a chance to write for it! I only wish I'd had time to write a fic for ALL your amazing prompts. I hope you enjoy, and thanks so much for your awesome taste in books and the opportunity to revisit this canon. 
> 
> Effusive thanks to betas after reveal!
> 
> ETA: Can't believe I put this in the summary by mistake, incredible. Sorry about that!

3AM on the morning they fly back, Billy’s eyes open. The ceiling above him is unfamiliar, spackled and gray. For a moment he doesn’t know where he is, or why, and then memory seeps in. Cold, like someone has cracked an egg on his skull, the slimy spread of resignation trickling down.

What woke him? He doesn’t know. Maybe a sound. He thinks about his phone, beneath his pillow, hand curled around it – he hasn’t texted Faison again, and she hasn’t texted him. He’s composed an infinite supply of missives and discarded each; they all felt distant, like some other Billy might have sent them. The Billy in a movie, that would have had a girl like that texting back. She hadn’t felt real when he’d held her, like watching his own life on the jumbotron.

It’s not true dark – cities never are, even in a windowless room, deep in the bowels of a city, or a basement underground. There’s something about the noise of a city, the hum of electricity, the presence of people, that keeps the lack of light from being true dark. It’s a soft dark, here, thin and reddish and warm, like closing your eyes. Too warm. Mango is snoring, and the room feels moist.

He should be sleeping; he has no idea how anyone is sleeping. Maybe the rooms on either side of his are full of soldiers staring at the ceiling with open eyes, too, beds like coffins. All at once he can’t stand the warm stillness any longer. He’s not worrying about the sound waking Mango – Mango and the others, they all know each other’s sleep-noises, the pattern and patter of it. Someone sneaking, that wakes you the fuck up, and quick, so Billy just finds his shoes and leaves. The hotel hallway is cooler, raising the hair on his bare legs.

He hears it again; it’s too soft to have possibly have been heard through the room’s door, but he feels the strange certainty it did all the same. A long, indrawn breath, juddering and quavering. He opens the door to the fire stairs, and smoke curls out. Sergeant Dime is sitting on the top step in his boxers and his wife beater, facing away. A disassembled fire detector sits next to the box of Shroom’s unfiltered Camels. Each plume comes out and up jagged, in fits and starts as Dime’s shoulders heave. A small pile of discarded butts sits next to him; there’s ash everywhere and no ash tray.

Billy has the brief, instinctive thought that he’ll be smoked himself, when Dime sees he’s awake and out of quarters, on this the night before they leave back to war. “Get your fucking heads back on and get what goddamn shut-eye you can now before I glue your eyes shut,” he’d said six hours before, and then had commenced a two hour round of pacing each door, checking their teeth and toothbrushes, their packed suitcases, until the rhythm of it, timeless and classic, lulled them all to sleep.

“Close the door,” Dime says now, quietly, words mumbled out around the cigarette, still not turning to look at him. For all he knows, a ghost could have opened the door. Shroom come back for one last Camel; there is something funereal about the moment – like holding vigil by a body.

Briefly, Billy hangs suspended on the threshold, the liminal boundary between one space and the next, flat ground and a stair stretching down. Then he steps through, and closes the door. It latches behind him in a way that sounds ominously final.

“Does this lock us out?” he asks into the echoing space of the stairwell. It’s lit only by the red glow of the exit signs, and the cherry ember of Dime’s cigarette.

“Christ, as though I can’t pick a lock,” Dime answers, and he sounds tired, sounds wet and raw, and when Billy sits on the top step next to him, gingerly sweeping the ash aside to make space for himself, he’s both surprised and not surprised at all to see the wet reflection of red light on Dime’s face. He’s still slowly, methodically smoking, slender tube held deftly between his slim fingers, brought to his lips, pulled away.

“Tastes like shit,” Dime says casually, as though his shoulders aren’t hunched, as though he’s not alone and goose-pimpled in a stairway that looks like a horror movie, or like some red-light district, or a church pew, all closed space and hallowed, profane ground.

“You okay, Sergeant?” Billy says into the hush, the in and out of nicotine and tar.

“No, Billy, I am not,” Dime says, closing his eyes and then finally turns, eyes still closed, and blows a perfect smoke ring into Billy’s face. The tears are still leaking, dripping down his cheeks even as a faint smile curls on his mouth when Billy coughs. He opens his eyes. They are red, but everything looks red in this light, and a little swollen, but this isn’t the kind of crying that leaks sweat and blood and snot, that clutches and kisses and gasps; it’s more peaceful, somehow, and infinitely sadder. Dime looks away.

“What you waiting for, kid. You need an invitation? A light?”

Billy fumbles out one of the cigarettes. He feels strange, hot in a fever-sick kind of way beneath his skin when Dime flips out Shroom’s old silver lighter and the wheel of it clicks and catches under his thumb, sparks a light between them. He doesn’t hold it out, so Billy has to lean in. The lighter, and the flame it holds, are shaking slightly, and so Billy steadies Dime’s wrist with his hand, breathing in as he feels the jump of a pulse against his fingertips.

He has seen his sergeant vulnerable before, seen him falling to pieces, frightened, devastated, clutching at his uniform collar with shaking hands and shoving his mouth against Billy’s like something resuscitating, brutally hard and necessary and desperate. But that had been with blood all around them, with Lake legless and screaming, the echoes of shots fired still ringing in their ears and stinging their trigger fingers.

He guesses he’d known Dime wasn’t okay, in the way that of course he isn’t, in the way that Dime has been these last fourteen days: so manic, so sharp, almost bigger than life, a reflected, too-bright version of himself. Now he’s stripped down, exhausted hollows beneath his eyes, hands shaking.

The absence of Shroom suddenly feels like more than the moment of it, which has been occupying the entirety of Billy’s brain since it happened, coloring every thought. The moment of Shroom sitting up in his arms, eyes on Billy’s face, and then laying back, empty.

These last few weeks have been a strange and impossible blip in their longer, aching journey of war, a break in the uncanny valley of America - too familiar to them to be alien, them too strange and changed for it to be home. But they’re going back now, to the familiarity of sand and grit, and it is not until now, this moment, with Dime alone and shivering in this stairwell, that he realizes the profoundness of the loss as more than just the loss itself.

David Dime and Virgil Breem, in their the easy effortless orbit, had an intangible weight of shared knowledge and history stretched between them like webs, the safety net they held their squad in. Dime these last weeks had been a man torn loose and lopsided in a cold wind, but talking as loud as he could manage, dragging his men safe through unfamiliar territory as best he could.

Billy thinks suddenly of Sykes weeping on stage next to Beyonce, but still standing firm beneath the lights and explosions and cameras, standing tall, and then Billy is crying too, silently, pressing his body along Dime’s, thigh to thigh and shoulder to shoulder. Dime jolts at first, then slowly, tentatively, sags against him. He’s warm, blazingly so in the damp chill of the concrete stairwell.

“Sorry about the hundred K,” Dime says out of nowhere into the darkness. He’s rubbing the back of his arm over his eyes, shuddering for a moment before he gets ahold of himself and steadies his breath. He starts smoking again, breath coming out in little ratcheted huffs. “Thanks for being there. I know you fuckin’ hated it, but you were - good. With everyone. I want you to know it wasn’t your fault shit went belly up.”

“Not your fault either,” Billy says, once he figures out Dime’s talking about the movie. “You did everything right. Nothing you could have done different. They were always gonna fuck us over.” Not Albert, maybe - Albert had, Billy believed, tried his damnedest for them, just like Dime. But Hollywood in general, maybe. The American viewing public, the audiences they wouldn’t sell to. America itself.

“I coulda - no, but you’re right. It wasn’t ever gonna work out.” Dime smokes thoughtfully for a while, then laughs, out of nowhere. Billy feels the vibration of it through his side, the skin of their knees where they touch. “Hilary fucking Swank, Jesus Christ.” He shakes his head.

“I thought she’d make a good me,” Billy jokes, and then feels strange and light-headed again when Dime snorts and shoots him a look. They’re too close, probably, like this. He thinks about Faison, the soft plushness of her, the almost-innocence of their kisses. He wants to touch his mouth - not bruised, but certainly sensitive.

“Nah, she’s not pretty enough,” Dime says, and blows a smoke ring at him again, his lips pursed and something in Billy goes a bit haywire between his own mouth and his brain.

“Did you ever kiss Shroom?”

Dime’s eyes go from half-mast to wide, and he tilts his head consideringly, then nods, apparently to himself, and slouches a little lower.

“Nah,” he says, around his cigarette and a slow, curling smirk. “He’s not pretty enough, either.”

Billy has that threshold feeling again, of hovering between going back or going forward, of a door that can close behind him or before him. Which means he should probably figure out what the fuck he’s doing, what the heady feeling of Faison in his arms meant to him besides safety, what Dime’s mouth bruised on his meant to him besides shock and shared anguish.

But far more concerning than that, immediately, is the feeling that he's overstepped, showed disrespect for something sacred, betrayed in some way this quiet space of dark and ashes and smoke, where Dime can cry and speak softly. Dime’s shuttered up now, glittering and teasing, and Billy doesn’t mind, normally, wouldn’t mind it later, but now it seems wrong, like a step backwards he didn’t mean to take.

“Sorry,” Billy says, carefully, like feeling his way in a minefield at night. “I shouldn't have asked that. It’s not any of my business.”

Dime blinks at him, then abruptly stops slouching, dropping the smirk, and rubs his eyes again.

“Hell,” he says into his palm. In sitting back up straight, he’d pressed against Billy again for a brief hot second, but now he’s holding his distance, ever so slightly, still close enough the warmth of him radiates over. He stubs out his cigarette and pulls out another, holding it between his fingers but not lighting it.

Billy waits, and eventually, slowly, Dime answers.

“Not the first time I've been asked. It's fine. You've got more right to ask than most.” He looks so tired. “And since you did, an honest answer: no, I did not kiss that beautiful man. He was my brother, and I loved him more than I've ever loved anyone, but our dicks never did meet face to face.” He flicks the lighter out, a spark of hot brightness in the dim red of the room, and drags in a lungful of smoke, holding it an impressively long time before letting it out.  “Any other questions, Billy boy? Ask and I shall answer, no holds barred, one time only.”

This man was still recognizably Sergeant Dime, still sharp and edged, but subtly transformed, softer and smudged. Billy realizes he’s seen flashes of this man before, talking around a fire late at night with Shroom at his side, has seen him these last two weeks, in brief glimpses - Dime looking to Billy in between his blazing whipcracks, his harrying of Bravo through the states and through their paces.

Billy still isn’t entirely sure what that look means, what Dime’s asking for, but he knows he’s edging closer to it. He knows also that he is not Shroom, and never can be. He knows he doesn’t want Dime to want that from him.

“Did you want to?”

“ _Damn_ ,” Dime whistles, eyebrows up. He’s smiling crookedly, even as his eyes stay red and his mouth tilts a little more towards sad than anything else. “Kid’s got balls on him. Well. Since you want to ask, I will tell,” he continues, and Billy’s heart goes double-time, “I did, a long time ago. Alas, heterosexuals.”

“Oh,” Billy says.

“Oh,” Dime gently mocks, and blows out a double-ring of smoke, this time, one inside the other.  

Billy's cigarette is long since out, and since he feels the powerful urge to do _something_ to shut up his mouth before he says something truly irrevocable, he fumbles out another. But it’s the last in the pack.

“Eh, go on,” Dime says, seeing his dilemma. “Not like Shroom can smoke them, now, and I hate the fucking things.”

Billy sticks it in his mouth, and is very aware of Dime looking at him as he does, dragging on his own cigarette thoughtfully. This time he does lean over to light Billy’s cigarette, and Billy breathes too shallowly for a moment before getting a grip and pulling air through, catching the flame.

“Thanks,” he says.

“My pleasure,” Dime says, settling back. “My turn for a question?”

Oh lord. “Shoot,” he says through dry lips, and struggles not to cough on his last lungful of smoke.

‘Why’d you ask?’ would have been the worst possible question, but the one Dime fires instead comes completely out of left field and shocks the hell out of him.

“Exactly how far,” Dime inquires, looking ponderously, ridiculously serious, leaning in, “did you get with your cheerleader?”

“Jesus, really?” Billy swears, glaring, and makes himself think back to Faison. His phone is still beneath his pillow, back in his room. He wonders if she’d texted him; he wonders what she could possibly say. He thinks he hopes she hasn’t. Faison and that farm, that idyllic haven, are inextricably linked in his head, and both equally impossible. He’s left both behind.

“Nowhere,” he answers slowly. “I got nowhere.”

Each kiss had seemed so fucking important, then - he remember the shocky joy of her coming against him, rubbing her sex on his, but it’s robbed of its heat now. The reality of it is close enough tonight he can see the space between him and Faison, her understanding and his.

“Dude,” Dime is chiding gently, ribbing him. “You had the option, with that fucking gorgeous stack of tits and ass all _over_ you, and nothing? You bring shame to our people, son.” Then, seeing the look of miserable exasperation Billy can’t repress shooting him, he sobers and knocks his shoulder against Billy’s. “She was beautiful. I’m sorry. Wish I could have-”

Have what? Stopped time? Stopped the war? What the fuck could Dime have done.

“Nah, kind of glad,” he muses aloud, and sees once again Dime’s eyebrows shoot up. “It- there was no way to have it, and not lose it in having it.” He can’t put it into words quite right. “I wish I hadn’t gotten the blowjob at the strip club,” he tries to explain. “It’s… it would have been like that. I got everything with Faison I could have had, I guess.”

Dime sighs. “Jesus, you’re such a - a goddamned - ”

“Idiot?”

“No, you’re a lot smarter than I am,” Dime says, shocking Billy’s own eyebrows up with such speed it almost hurts, a little. “You think too much, actually. But I understand. You wanted something real.”

 _Yes_. He rubs at his own face - he’s crying a little, now. They’re both in mourning, he thinks, in their stairway between floors, between night and day, smoking for the memory of their lost loves. The ones they'd had and never had. For his sister, weeping and waiting for him. For Shroom, in all his glory. That beautiful man. For Lake, left behind. For all of them.

“You’re gonna be alright, William Lynn,” Dime says softly, pressed against his shoulder, and takes a last drag off the end of his last cigarette.

Billy’s chest hurts, an enormous ache that pounds with his heart. He passes over his half-smoked cigarette, and watches Dime take a drag. When Dime passes it back, his lips around the damp paper where his has been feels like softest possible version of a kiss. If the kiss in Iraq had been the hardest, most painful, this is the saddest and sweetest.

He gets the last drag. He keeps it burning in his lungs as long as he can, then stubs the spark of it out, leans over, and kisses Dime. Dime makes a tiny, choked noise that zings around his body like shrapnel, kissing back for the briefest moment, mouth opening enough that Billy can taste nicotine, wet and hot.

Then Dime is pulling back, swearing, scrubbing a hand over his mouth.

“Goddammit, Billy,” he says, like he's been punched. Billy feels much the same, only more like he's taken a step forward onto a trapdoor that's dumped him into hell, the drop of his stomach so instant and nauseating, he feels bile climb his throat. But then Dime lifts his head out of his hands and must see it on Billy’s face.

“Fuck, I'm fucking this the fuck up,” he says, groaning, and drags Billy into his lap, easy as anything. Billy goes impossibly, instantly hard, from nauseous nothing to full throbbing mast, blood draining from his head to his dick so fast he’s dizzy. Dime’s hand is huge and hot on his jaw, and tilts Billy’s head up. “Third time’s the charm, I guess,” he says inexplicably, close enough now that their lips brush as he speaks. Billy’s not sure what his body’s doing, but all his nerves are firing like crazy. His dick’s twitching in his pants, his nipples hard and over-sensitive against his tank top even before Dime starts rubbing at one, his bare legs are goose-pimpling and toes curling. “Tell me yes.”

“Yes,” Billy says immediately, dazed, and gets kissed. It feels like being devoured, or being fucked - tongued open, each time a bit deeper until his jaw aches, almost, and he’s moaning around it. He distantly registers his rocking hips and feels Dime grunt, hand sliding down his jaw and pressing at his pulse. He pushes up into the touch and is dazedly unhappy when it abruptly disappears.

Dime pulls away and hisses through his teeth when Billy chases after him. “Down, soldier,” he commands and Billy stills, panting. “Oh, shit, you’re gonna fucking _kill_ me, Billy.”

Fuck, Billy thinks, coming down slightly, breath wild and heart wilder. Fuck fuck fuck. Fuck.

“I shouldn’t have kissed you that first time, or this time,” Dime says, still holding onto him, hand dropped to cradle his hip. At some point, when Billy wasn’t paying attention, he’d gotten his leg around Dime’s waist and shifting his hips feels impossible, but he’s doing it. “ _Not_ because I don’t want to, or because you’re too young - you were the oldest fucking seventeen I’ve ever met, you’re older than me, some days - but it’s my job, my responsibility, to take care of my men, of you, of all of you. I shouldn’t have started this. You’re still figuring your shit out, and I can’t, I won’t take advantage.” He pauses, wincing. His face is flushed red even in the reddish light, especially, distractingly, around his mouth. “Again.”

He is the same man he’s always been, but open, raw and vulnerable and gorgeous with it, and now Billy is openly cataloging the things he’s always noticed but not thought on - the breadth of his shoulders, his fucking arms, the strong lines of his jaw, his strength, his movie-star face, actor-handsome. Jesus, what was he kissing Billy for? He and Faison might have been made for each other, if only in looks.

“I was so jealous of that damn cheerleader, god. You know, Shroom would laugh his ass off, he knew I had a fucking boner for you ever since I heard that story about you fucking up the SAAB. Called me a cradle-robber.” Billy begins to realize that Dime is nervous, that Dime is _babbling_. The world is rearranging itself with this new knowledge. “I mean, Jesus, you’re still a virgin.”

“Well, I’m going to war tomorrow,” Billy manages, and bites his lower lip, half joking, half about to die of shocky wanting. “What if I don’t want to die a virgin, sir?” He gets Dime shuddering all over, then he’s slapped upside the head, and hauled in and kissed again, which is mixed messages all over.

“Billy, Billy, god, what I’d do to you. I’d fuck you so good, baby, the realest sex you’ve ever had, I’d take you home and eat you out, and after you’d _cry_ I’d fuck you so good. What do you want, Billy, I bet it’s a house, you want a house, I’ll buy you one, I’ll treat you right. Fuck, fuck. Oh my god, baby, are you gonna--yeah, do it, oh baby boy, fuck, I’m going to hell, you’re _so good_.”

Billy comes untouched, rubbing himself against Dime’s abs just like Faison, and coming like this, it’s like being electrocuted, his whole body livewire taught. Dime’s everywhere around him, familiar and honest and shuddering himself. He collapses against Dime’s chest, dragging in almost painful gasps of the still smoky-scented air, and Dime is crooning in his ear.

“Well, aren’t I fucked now,” he’s saying, petting Billy’s sweaty back. “Every time you call me sir, I’ll pop wood.”

“Yes, sir,” Billy agrees, still feeling dazed, but he’s dizzyingly delighted when Dime groans and buries his head in Billy’s shoulder. It feels like he’s still recalibrating for a world where this is real, where he knows not just how Dime’s mouth feels, but his hand, his tongue, his skin. Rough, chapped, stubbled, sweaty, cigarette-stained, and so fucking _visceral_.

“Eleven months,” Dime whispers. “Billy. I’ll get you through it or I’ll die trying. Eleven months and then I’ll take you home.”

He thinks of having Dime’s six in the field, thinks of staring at his mouth and talking strategy late at night, thinks of teasing and waiting and hoping and maybe this won’t last, but it’s already re-shaped him, deep in his bones. The vulnerability of Dime. No, he thinks, suddenly dry-mouthed at the audacity of it, The vulnerability of _David_ , who needs him.

There’s a distant guilt for so quickly abandoning the dream that Faison was, for so willingly following his squad, his leader, back into the fray and abandoning his family. For Dime’s burden, for his grief. Shroom is still gone, and Lake still left behind, and the space their absences carves into the world is eternal and growing. Billy has begun to think he’ll never understand it.

But he knows himself better than he did yesterday, and if he makes it through another stretch of war alive, he has something waiting for him, some new truth to learn. If there’s a bullet for him, it already has his name on it, but until then, he's got something to do, and somewhere to go.

"Okay, I gotta pick the lock and send you to bed," Dime says, nuzzling at him. "One last for the road?"

If it's the last one, Billy thinks, drinking the kiss in, tasting blood and smoke, remembering fire and death, if this is what he gets, well. It's weird, and fucked up, but it's real, as real as anything he's ever touched.

He'll take it.


End file.
